AI Seoul Summit: 16 AI Companies Sign Frontier AI Safety Commitments
In a “historic first,” 16 global AI companies have signed new commitments to safely develop AI models. The announcement was made during the virtual AI Seoul Summit, the second event on AI safety co-hosted on May 21-22 by the UK and South Korea. The Frontier AI Safety Commitments’ signatories include some of the biggest US tech giants, such as Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft and OpenAI. They also include AI organizations from Europe (Cohere and Mistral AI), the Middle East (G42 and the Technology Innovation Institute) and Asia (Naver, Samsung and Zhipu.ai).
New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC
At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users. “Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,” Microsoft says on its website. “The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots.”
GitHub warns of SAML auth bypass flaw in Enterprise Server
GitHub has fixed a maximum severity (CVSS v4 score: 10.0) authentication bypass vulnerability tracked as CVE-2024-4986, which impacts GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) instances using SAML single sign-on (SSO) authentication. Exploiting the flaw would allow a threat actor to forge a SAML response and gain administrator privileges, providing unrestricted access to all of the instance’s contents without requiring any authentication. GHES is a self-hosted version of GitHub designed for organizations that prefer to store repositories on their own servers or private cloud environments.
CYBERCOM, DARPA pen agreement to speed up advanced cyberwarfare research
U.S. Cyber Command and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency signed a binding memorandum this month that carves out pathways needed to expedite research and development of advanced cyberware technologies in the Department of Defense. The agreement, announced by the two Pentagon agencies this week, establishes budgets, roles and governance structures needed to swiftly move cyber technologies “from the laboratory to the cyber battlefield,” they said. The move centers DARPA — the research giant focused on advanced technology for U.S. military capabilities — as the frontrunner entity that provides projects to be loaded into CYBERCOM’s software suite.
Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag
Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geo-locate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data from Apple to track the location of billions of devices globally — including non-Apple devices like Starlink systems — and found they could use this data to monitor the destruction of Gaza, as well as the movements and in many cases identities of Russian and Ukrainian troops. At issue is the way that Apple collects and publicly shares information about the precise location of all Wi-Fi access points seen by its devices. Apple collects this location data to give Apple devices a crowdsourced, low-power alternative to constantly requesting global positioning system (GPS) coordinates.
